Love can have this vast, all-encompassing quality. It can be allowed to spread until it permeates the very core of our relationships. Yet often, instead of giving love room to expand, we box it in with our expectations. Expectations make our love conditional on whether or not the relationship fulfills our wishes. How can you expect love to last when you demand that it meet your conditions, and you act as if you own another person?

17th Karmapa

from the book The Heart Is Noble: Changing the World from the Inside Out

translated by Ngodup Tsering Burkhar & Damchö Diana Finnegan


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Further quotes from the book The Heart Is Noble:

• Healthy relationships
• There are no fixed starting points
• A noble vision
• Disconnected from our own noble heart
• Authentic love toward others
• Capacity for Change
• Finding our nobility of heart
• Loving Responsibility
• Difference without Division
• Our relationship to the material world
• Open-minded
• There are no fixed starting points
• Just Love
• My trust is a gift
• Our life is vast
• Making healthy relationships possible
• Authentic love
• Interdependent reality
• We truly have everything we need already